Local actors Lee-Anne Summers, Colin Moss and Chanelle de Jager are hoping a successful Cape Town run of the award-winning Broadway show Fat Pig will lead to it's being staged nationwide.
The show tackles questions of body image and Hollywood criteria.
Summers, producer of the local version of the show, said yesterday she planned more than five years ago to do the Neil LaBute show.
She graduated from the New York Film Academy after a psychology degree at the University of Cape Town and had appeared previously in LaBute stage shows, including The Shape of Things, The Children's Hour, Agnes of God and Proof.
"This show is my favourite of all his work . every time I got the rights for a local version of the show, I got booked on other projects, so I couldn't follow through until now," Summers said yesterday.
She got the rights for a 15-show run at Cape Town's On Broadway last year and started picking her cast ahead of rehearsals this May.
"I always knew I wanted Colin [Moss]. We worked together on Big Fellas and he's such a brilliant actor and amazing to work with. Chanelle had us in tears by the end of her audition. She blew us away and had to be in."
Summers said the show was written "very much like" the sitcom on local TV.
The show revolves around Tom (played by Moss), who falls in love with Helen (De Jager), a plus-sized librarian, in a society preoccupied with perfect appearance.
Moss said he wouldn't have agreed to do the show if the script had it not been so "hysterically funny".
"I don't do much theatre. I don't do it because I have a bond," he laughed.
Moss said he had "made time" to join the show without missing corporate gigs and possible commercials and films.
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